A Team Of Women Researchers Is Stepping Up For Victims Of A Notorious Serial Killer

Serial killer Robert “Willie” Pickton confessed to 49 murders , according to an undercover investigator pretending to be his cellmate, yet the Canadian pig farmer was only ever prosecuted in the deaths of six women.

For years, that has sparked outrage from families seeking justice for other victims, many of them Indigenous women. And when Canadian police requested to destroy or return thousands of items collected on the pig farm in the early 2000s, it spurred developmental psychologist Sasha Reid to form a team of civilian researchers to reexamine the case — and potentially prove that Pickton, who died last week after being attacked in prison, didn’t act alone.

“It shouldn’t have to be a ragtag team of women who are doing this and trying to get follow-ups, and pushing for justice on behalf of these families,” Reid told HuffPost. “That should be the police.”

The team’s work is the subject of “Sasha Reid & The Midnight Order,” a five-part docuseries premiering July 9 on Freeform. Reid, who has built two massive databases of serial killers and missing and murdered persons in Canada, said she came up with the group’s “dark and scary” name to spark excitement about their investigations.

In 2005, Pickton was charged with the murders of 27 women, but he was ultimately prosecuted in the deaths of only six confirmed victims: Sereena Abotsway, Mona Wilson, Andrea Joesbury, Brenda Ann Wolfe, Georgina Papin and Marnie Frey. A judge dismissed one case for lack of evidence, and the charges for 20 other alleged victims were “stayed,” or suspended, after he was convicted by prosecutors who said he had already received the harshest sentence allowed.

In the decades before his arrest in 2002, dozens of women, most of them Indigenous,